Buckinghamshire

One of the smaller English counties, Buckinghamshire had two main distinctive regions, divided by the steep chalk hills of the Chilterns. Low-lying valleys interspersed with hills and many rivers and streams lay to the north of that escarpment; here the raising of livestock predominated. To the south was that part of the county situated in the Thames valley. It was generally level and its rich soils were well suited to arable farming. In common with elsewhere in the kingdom, Buckinghamshire suffered the abandonment of villages and arable land following the Black Death, and the period under review coincided with a significant rise in enclosure and sheep-farming. While predominantly agricultural, Buckinghamshire had as many as 18 boroughs by 1500 but none was of any great size. The two most important were Chipping Wycombe, the only parliamentary borough in Buckinghamshire in Henry VI’s reign, and Aylesbury, which for all practical purposes had superseded Buckingham, inconveniently located in the far north of the county, as the county town.2 M. Reed, Hist. Bucks. 13-15, 17, 41-42, 48-49; idem, Bucks. Landscape, 25-27, 144-6; G. Lipscomb, Bucks. ii. 27. The King did not possess a significant territorial power base in Buckinghamshire, which had no royal castles and where his only residence, the manor-house at Langley Marish, was usually in the hands of lessees,3 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 276; VCH Bucks. iii. 296. but the county was well within the royal orbit. It lay partly in the Thames valley, where the King spent so much of his time, and south Buckinghamshire was close to Windsor castle.4 The constituency survey for Bucks. in the years 1386-1421 pursues a different argument, by ascribing the election of only three royal retainers as MPs for the county in that period to the very lack of royal castles or residences there, but it fails to acknowledge the proximity of Windsor. The county also lacked a residential lay magnate or great aristocratic and ecclesiastical estates. For the most part, its religious houses were small and unimportant, and their insignificance may have contributed to the problems the Church faced in the mid Thames valley, a stronghold of lollardy.5 VCH Bucks. i. 346; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 277.

Most of Buckinghamshire’s election returns for this period have survived although those to the Parliaments of 1439, 1445, 1455, 1459 and 1460 are no longer extant. The fine rolls record the names of the MPs of 1439 and 1445 but the knights of the shire in the other three Parliaments are completely unknown, meaning that what follows necessarily depends on incomplete evidence. At least 22 men sat as knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire in Henry VI’s reign. Included in this total is Walter Strickland. While he probably did enter the Commons after his illegal return to the Parliament of 1429, it is impossible to prove that he actually took up his seat.

Most of the 22 were primarily resident in Buckinghamshire or possessed interests there at the time of their elections but not all were natives of the county. Just five of them, John Cheyne, Sir John Cheyne, Sir Thomas Sackville and the brothers John II and Edmund Hampden, were members of old Buckinghamshire families of distinguished lineage, although those of both John Giffard and the Hampdens’ distant relative, John Hampden I, even if not of the first rank, were also well established there. By contrast, Strickland, who came into lands in Buckinghamshire through his first marriage, was from northern England, as perhaps was the father of John Heton, a recent arrival in the county of obscure ancestry. Thomas Rokes was another northerner, as possibly was Robert Manfeld. Thomas Daniell was from a Cheshire family of no great distinction and Thomas Singleton, of minor gentry stock, was from Kent. Like Strickland, Singleton acquired his interests in Buckinghamshire through marriage. Although they were recent arrivals to the county, he and Strickland possessed a stronger connexion with it than did Daniell or his fellow MP of 1447, Thomas Tresham. Indeed, it is unlikely that either of the latter pair, both semi-outsiders, fulfilled the statutory residential qualification when elected in 1447.

As was the case in the three and a half decades prior to 1422, during the period under review there were traditions of family service in Parliament among the 22, as there were in Bedfordshire, the county with which it shared a sheriff and escheator. John Cheyne, John Hampden II and his brother, Edmund Hampden, were the sons of knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire and both Hampdens were also the sons-in-law of another parliamentarian, John Whalesborough†. John Barton was the younger brother and namesake of John Barton†, who sat for the county in at least five Parliaments of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, and Robert James was the son of John James†, an MP on at least seven occasions, either for Wallingford or for one or other of the counties of Oxfordshire and Berkshire. Robert’s first wife was a younger daughter of Sir Edmund de la Pole†, who sat in three Parliaments of the later fourteenth century, twice for Buckinghamshire and once for Cambridgeshire. The fathers of Robert Whittingham, Tresham and Strickland were also all knights of the shire for other counties, as were a brother (Sir Thomas Strickland*) and nephew (Walter Strickland II*) of the latter, whose own son, Richard Strickland*, would sit as a burgess for East Grinstead in 1453. Thomas Tresham’s father, William Tresham*, was a particularly distinguished parliamentarian. William sat for Northamptonshire in no fewer than 12 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign (including Thomas’s first three) and was four times Speaker of the Commons. Sackville’s family may have had the longest tradition of service in the Commons, since his paternal grandfather and namesake, Sir Thomas Sackville†, was a knight of the shire for Buckinghamshire in no fewer than 14 of Richard II’s Parliaments and was himself the grandson of an MP. Sackville’s other grandfather, John Englefield†, also sat in Richard II’s reign, as a knight of the shire for Berkshire. Sir William Lucy was likewise the grandson of an MP, in his case Sir Warin Archdeacon† of Cornwall. Robert Olney and Rokes were the sons-in-law of MPs, Olney of William Bosom†, who sat for Bedfordshire in four Parliaments of the first two Lancastrian Kings, and Rokes the son-in-law of another of the 22, Sir Thomas Sackville. Rokes was also the father of Thomas Rokes†, who sat for Buckinghamshire in Edward IV’s reign. Singleton’s wife was a descendant of Sir Robert Luton†, a knight of the shire for Buckinghamshire in that of Richard II, and Andrew Sperlyng’s father was probably Nicholas Sperlyng†, a burgess for Chipping Wycombe in 1402. Finally, Heton was perhaps the son of William Heton*, a knight of the shire for Rutland in the Parliament of 1442. Such myriad connexions with Parliament are likely to have ensured that many of the 22 already possessed some considerable foreknowledge of Parliament and its workings before they entered the Commons for the first (or only) time. As it happened, they did little towards either maintaining or founding parliamentary dynasties: only Rokes and Strickland were certainly the fathers of MPs, while Barton, Sir John Cheyne, Edmund Hampden, Robert James, Lucy, Olney, Singleton, William Whaplode, Whittingham and Richard Wyot left no surviving sons.

By the early Lancastrian period, the belted knight had begun to give way to esquires and lawyers as the electorate of Buckinghamshire came increasingly to elect members of the legal profession to the Commons.6 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 275. This trend continued for some time after the accession of Henry VI. Only three of the 22 sat in the Commons as knights proper (although Daniell, Hampden, Tresham and Whittingham would receive knighthoods later in their careers) and the county returned several members of the legal profession to the earlier Parliaments of the reign. Barton, Sperlyng and Whaplode were all certainly lawyers, as probably were Wyot, John Hampden I and Giffard. Barton was a particularly eminent practitioner of the law (he resisted under some duress several summonses to take the coif as a serjeant-at-law) but, as their employment by their various prominent patrons testifies, Sperlyng and Whaplode were likewise distinguished lawyers. Between the Parliament of 1437 and the end of the reign, however, none of the known MPs for Buckinghamshire was a lawyer, possibly because the rising tensions of the mid fifteenth century made men of law, typically apolitical, less likely to stand for election.

Knighthood had yet to lose its association with the pursuit of arms. It is impossible to treat the (perhaps apocryphal) story of Sir John Cheyne’s supposed adventures in the Holy Land as serious evidence of a military career, but it is likely that Sackville earned his knighthood serving the Crown in a military capacity. Lucy certainly campaigned extensively in France, only returning home for good some four and a half years before his election to the Parliament of 1449-50. Although the backdrop to this assembly was the disastrous situation in France, he remained loyal to the Lancastrian regime, unlike those veterans who subsequently became adherents of Richard, duke of York. Whittingham, who did not receive his knighthood (in his case on a civil war battlefield) until just weeks before Henry VI lost his throne, also served in France before entering the Commons, as did the never knighted Strickland. It is also possible that John Cheyne, another of those who remained an esquire, participated in Richard II’s first expedition to Ireland, nearly two decades before his election to his first known Parliament in 1413.

Belted knights or not, most (if not all) of the MPs possessed the means comfortably to support knighthoods. Several of them, notably Robert James, Sackville, John Hampden II, Lucy and Whittingham, were substantial or very substantial landowners and a clear majority of the 22 also possessed holdings outside Buckinghamshire, whether through inheritance, purchase, marriage or royal grant. Most of these estates elsewhere lay in southern England or in the Midlands, although Lucy held a couple of lordships in west Wales by grant of Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, and Daniell the manor of Frodsham in his native Cheshire by gift of the Crown. Reliable estimates of the MPs’ annual landed incomes are hard to come by but it is likely that Lucy enjoyed an income well in excess of £200 p.a. – perhaps as much as £300 – when he died. The unfortunate John Cheyne stands out as a landowner, in so far as he ran into such serious financial straits that he lost all his holdings as a result, even though his assessment for the subsidy of 1436 found that his lands were worth £200 p.a. According to the same subsidy returns, Robert James’s widow held property worth £100 a year, a figure providing some idea of the extent of her late husband’s lands, although at least some of them had by then passed to his grandson, Edmund Rede*. Less impressively, Strickland’s assessment for that tax found that he possessed land in Buckinghamshire, Wiltshire and London (which he must have held jure uxoris) worth £57 p.a.

Previous participation in the local government in the county was not a sine qua non for prospective knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire, even though, as in the period 1386-1421,7 Ibid. 275-6. the community of the shire preferred candidates with some experience in its administration. Strickland had not served in the local government of Buckinghamshire when elected in 1429, and Daniell, Heton and Whittingham had likewise yet to do so when standing for their first or only Parliaments as a representative for the county. Two others, Sir John Cheyne and John Hampden I, both of whom had already sat as knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire before 1422, had gained such administrative experience by the accession of Henry VI but neither possessed it when first elected for the county. Yet there is no evidence that this lack of experience arose from youthfulness, since none of these six men appears to have begun his parliamentary career at a particularly tender age. Another of the 22, Tresham, did not serve in the administration of Buckinghamshire under the immediate jurisdiction of Henry VI as King, although he was an officer in the county for the royal duchy of Lancaster when elected in 1447. In spite of these examples, it is nevertheless worth noting that only a couple of the 19 elections for which the names of Buckinghamshire’s knights of the shire have survived, those to the consecutive Parliaments of 1447 and February 1449, resulted in the returns of two MPs totally lacking in local government experience.

Among the most experienced administrators at a county level was the putative lawyer, John Hampden I, who joined his first commission in Buckinghamshire some half a dozen years before gaining election to his only known Parliament of Henry VI’s reign. Continuously on the Buckinghamshire bench during the last 26 years or so of his long life, he was a member of the quorum for most of his time as a j.p. but never sheriff or escheator. By contrast, 13 of his fellow Members received an appointment to the joint shrievalty of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire on one or more occasions although only Manfeld, Singleton and Whittingham held that office before beginning their parliamentary careers. The Crown also pricked several of the MPs for the office of sheriff elsewhere, of whom Robert James, Daniell (irregularly returned for Buckinghamshire in 1447 while sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk), Tresham and Lucy, never exercised it in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Ten of the 22 were escheators of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, including Robert James, who also served several terms as such in Oxfordshire and Berkshire before sitting for Buckinghamshire. Seven of these escheators had already begun their parliamentary careers when first appointed to that position. Two of them, Whaplode and Edmund Hampden, combined the office with that of an MP: Whaplode began the first of his four terms as such shortly before entering the Parliament of 1420 and Hampden was likewise escheator when he took up his seat in that of 1439. Like John Hampden I, 20 of the other MPs (all save Strickland) served as commissioners of the peace but neither Robert James nor Tresham was a justice in Buckinghamshire. As far as the evidence goes, 13 of these j.p.s began their parliamentary careers after their initial appointment to the bench. All of the MPs served on the various ad hoc commissions that most gentry of upper and middling rank could ordinarily expect to come their way although only Strickland and Tresham appear not to have held any commission of this type in Buckinghamshire. Again, over half of them would appear to have begun their parliamentary careers when first appointed to such a commission. Only John Hampden I did not play a role in county government outside Buckinghamshire. Involvement in the administration of other counties, albeit predominantly in the southern half of England, reflects the fact that a majority of the MPs possessed lands elsewhere.

Neighbouring Bedfordshire presents a somewhat different picture in terms of patterns of service in local government. Far fewer of its known MPs of this period became sheriff or escheator of that county and Buckinghamshire, and nearly all those that did had already sat in Parliament when they took up those positions. In common with Buckinghamshire, a majority of its MPs served on the commission of the peace, but only one of these men was a j.p. before entering Parliament. It is nevertheless impossible to determine if the electorate of Bedfordshire had less regard for administrative experience, or whether fewer gentlemen with such experience there were prepared to stand for election to the Commons.

As one might expect of a county where the Crown lacked substantial landed interests, just three of the 22 held office on its estates in Buckinghamshire. Both Whaplode and Tresham sat in the Commons while officers of the duchy of Lancaster in the county, while John Hampden II held office on the King’s park at Risborough at the time of his election to his final Parliament in 1445. As his Risborough offices demonstrate, Hampden enjoyed his share of Henry VI’s largesse, even though he was never apparently a member of the King’s household like his younger brother, Edmund.

At least seven others among the 22 (Daniell, Lucy, Manfeld, Olney, Rokes, Tresham and Whittingham), were members of the Household or otherwise linked with the royal establishment when they began their parliamentary careers,8 Although Strickland had been an esq. of Henry V’s household, he is discounted here because it is uncertain whether he had already begun his service in that of Henry VI at the time of his ‘election’ in 1429. and Rokes and Manfeld, both of obscure origin, may particularly have depended on their connexion with the Crown to secure their seats. The association with the Court of the MPs as a group was therefore markedly stronger than that of their predecessors in the years 1386-1421 when the shire rarely returned one of the King’s retainers to Parliament.9 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 276.It is worth noting that most of the Parliaments in which those with Household connexions sat occurred in the second half of Henry VI’s reign, indicating that this element became increasingly prominent in the parliamentary representation of the county during that volatile period. There is no doubting the commitment of Lucy, Edmund Hampden, Tresham (Speaker in the notoriously anti-Yorkist Parliament of 1459) and Whittingham to Henry VI. All took up arms following the descent of political division into violence and all died on the battlefield or on the scaffold in the cause of the last Lancastrian monarch.

Only Whittingham, a member of the King’s Council, certainly held office in central government when he entered Parliament although three of the other MPs would serve the Crown at that level after beginning their parliamentary careers. Like Whittingham, Lucy joined the Council; Manfeld became master of the Mint; and Tresham served as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster estates set aside to the use of the King’s will. Another of the 22, Daniell, became joint King’s remembrancer in the Exchequer while representing Buckinghamshire in the Parliament of 1447 but this appointment was a relatively short-lived sinecure. Lucy is the only man among the 22 known to have acted for the Crown in a diplomatic capacity (he helped to negotiate an extension of an existing truce between England and Scotland) but, again, not until after he had left Parliament.

Most of the MPs had associations with one or more lords during their careers, although there is no definite evidence of magnate intervention in elections for Buckinghamshire’s knights of the shire. It is a fair assumption, but impossible to prove, that John Hampden II’s ties with Thomas Chaucer* and his son-in-law William de la Pole, earl (later duke) of Suffolk, advanced his parliamentary career. It is likewise not possible to say that Barton owed his election to his second and third Parliaments to his patron Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, or Heton his place in both of his known Parliaments to Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham. In short, one cannot confidently explain the conduct or outcome of any of the county’s elections in this period in terms of baronial politics.

A few of the MPs were associated with high-ranking ecclesiastical magnates. Before entering Parliament for the first time, Wyot took up office as steward of Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, a position he continued to hold until not long before his death. His successor as steward was Whaplode, another long-serving official on Beaufort’s episcopal estates. Two other Members, Barton and Singleton, were respectively linked to a couple of the most prominent churchmen of the day, Henry Chichele and John Kemp, in both cases prior to becoming MPs. Barton began his long association with Chichele before the latter had embarked on his distinguished episcopal career. For many years, he was also the steward of St. Albans abbey, one of the greatest religious houses in the kingdom, an office he held before first entering the Commons and throughout his parliamentary career. Singleton served Kemp, archbishop of York and a fellow Kentish man, from at least the late 1420s until the latter died in 1454. In all likelihood, he enjoyed the backing of his patron, then chancellor of England, when he stood for election to Parliament in 1450 but, as is the case with those MPs connected with lay magnates, this is impossible to prove.

It is clear, notwithstanding the loss of the names of those who sat for the county in the last three Parliaments of the reign, that there was considerable continuity in the parliamentary representation of Buckinghamshire in this period, just as there was in the previous three and a half decades.10 Ibid. 273. As far as is known, just five of the 22 sat in only one Parliament.11 Lucy, Rokes, Sackville, Singleton and Whittingham. Strickland is excluded here because it is unclear if he ever actually sat. Wyot was a Member of as many as eight between 1407 and 1426, seven times for Buckinghamshire and once, in the first Parliament of Henry V’s reign, for Middlesex. While he attended more Parliaments than the other MPs, his parliamentary career spanned a shorter period than those of Robert James and Sir John Cheyne, two others who first sat before 1422. Robert was a knight of the shire for Buckinghamshire in three Parliaments and for Berkshire, the county he represented as a novice MP in the Parliament of January 1397, on four others. He left the Commons for the last time nearly 26 years later, in December 1422. Cheyne’s parliamentary career, spanning nearly a quarter of a century, was only a little shorter. Like Robert James, he gained election to seven Parliaments (on each occasion for Buckinghamshire), although he may actually have sat in six, given that the return of him and Strickland in 1429 was irregular. Apart from Wyot, Robert James and Sir John Cheyne, at least half a dozen of the others among the 22 (Barton, John Cheyne I, Giffard, John Hampden I, Sperlyng and Whaplode) first entered the Commons before 1422 but only Tresham certainly sat in the Commons after Henry VI’s reign.

There were at least five re-elections, in the sense of elections to consecutive Parliaments, during the period under review: Barton was re-elected in 1423; Sir John Cheyne in 1426; John Hampden II in 1432; Manfeld in 1442; and Daniell in February 1449. It was not until 1439 that both Members were newcomers to the Commons, but that is the only occasion in Henry VI’s reign for which there is no evidence that either MP had sat previously, whether for Buckinghamshire or another constituency. By the latter half of the reign Buckinghamshire was returning more novices than hitherto, and in five successive Parliaments, beginning with that of 1447, one of the MPs was always a newcomer. What lay behind this trend is impossible to say for sure, although it was perhaps the consequence of an increasing reluctance to enter the Commons in a period of growing national instability and crises. Most of the men who represented the county in these later Parliaments were members of the Household, men more likely than those without such a connexion to have a political motivation for seeking election.

Six of the MPs, Robert James, Wyot, Edmund Hampden, Daniell, Tresham and Whaplode also sat for other constituencies. As previously mentioned, James was four times a knight of the shire for Berkshire, where he held several manors, and Wyot sat for Middlesex in 1413. Having represented Buckinghamshire in the Commons of 1439, Edmund Hampden was a knight of the shire for Oxfordshire in four subsequent Parliaments. Daniell was returned as a knight of the shire for Cornwall in 1445 and (probably) for an unknown constituency in 1459. It would also appear that he was elected for Great Bedwyn as well as Buckinghamshire in 1447 when ‘Daneell’ was one of the men returned for that tiny Wiltshire borough, by now represented almost exclusively by outsiders. Tresham, Daniell’s fellow knight of the shire in 1447, also sat twice for Huntingdonshire and three times for Northamptonshire, his main county of residence. Finally, Whaplode was a burgess for Chipping Wycombe, which he was qualified to represent because he owned property there, in the Parliament of 1425. Whaplode was not the only one of the MPs to sit for that town, for Sperlyng represented it in three of Henry V’s Parliaments. In fact, he was more closely associated with Wycombe than Whaplode, since he resided there in the early part of his career and was probably the son of one of its former mayors and parliamentary burgesses.

The normal venue for elections was Aylesbury, although that of 1423 took place at Newport Pagnell and those for the Parliaments of 1447 and February 1449 at Buckingham. All but one of the surviving returns takes the standard form of an indenture in Latin between the sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire on the one hand and a group of attestors acting for the county on the other. The exception is that for 1447, which is in English like the corresponding indenture for Bedfordshire, and in which the sheriff, Thomas Giffard, features at the end of the document as the last named witness, rather than as the first-named party. It is not clear why this is so, but it is possible that this deviation from the norm was in some way connected to the political circumstances in which the Parliament met. The number of attestors ranged from as many as 202 in 1447 to as few as 18 in 1426, although there were also high attendances at the controversial election of 1429 and that of 1432.

The election of 1429 took place at a shire court held on 31 Aug. Sperlyng and John Hampden II were the men named as the new MPs for the county although possibly not without a contest since no fewer than 125 attestors witnessed the return.12 The constituency survey for Bucks. in The Commons 1386-1421, i. 277 and Sperlyng’s biography (ibid. iv. 422) respectively give the incorrect totals of 128 and 129. Whatever the case, the sheriff, Sir Thomas Waweton*, who had played a prominent part in an irregular election in Huntingdonshire just ten days earlier, ignored this result and returned into Chancery a false indenture of the same date. Bearing the names of 80 supposed witnesses, this purported to show that the county court had elected Sir John Cheyne (ironically, one of those who had attested the original indenture) and Walter Strickland. It is difficult to explain what motivated Waweton to act as he did, although his personal ties with Cheyne, an old friend, could have prompted his support for that knight, with whose lollard associations he might even have sympathised. Hampden and Sperlyng responded by petitioning the Crown, which established a commission to investigate the matter, although not until after the Parliament had opened. A week after the dissolution of Parliament, a judicial hearing at Aylesbury established that the sheriff had indeed made a false return and that the petitioners should have sat for the county. As a result, Waweton forfeited £100 for breaching the statute of 1406 against corrupt elections, a fine which Hampden and Sperlyng themselves collected.13 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 277; ii. 553; iv. 791; CPR, 1429-36, p. 39; E159/206, brevia Trin. rot. 4; E207/14/3; E403/700, m. 12. It is unclear if Cheyne and Strickland were able to take up the seats not rightfully theirs, or whether Buckinghamshire ended up unrepresented in this assembly. The return of Hampden and Sperlyng to the following Parliament was perhaps a case of the electorate expressing its feelings about the machinations of 1429 although Cheyne was able to gain election in 1432, in spite of his arrest in June 1431 for suspected involvement in an abortive lollard rising in Berkshire.

It seems that the election of 1432, for which there were 136 attestors, witnessed another contest, probably because the candidature of Sir John Cheyne, a man with a long record of lawlessness as well as of dubious religious orthodoxy, was particularly controversial.14 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 277 (although this mistakenly states that there were 137 attestors). Intriguingly, Cheyne’s fellow knight of the shire in 1432 was none other than his erstwhile opponent John Hampden II, but there is no way of knowing whether the two men struggled to co-operate with each other following their election.

There is little doubt that the exceptional attendance at the county court in 1447 arose from the government’s determination to secure the return of its supporters to the Parliament that witnessed the death of its opponent, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Significantly, 146 of the 202 attestors do not feature in any of the other extant Buckinghamshire returns for Henry VI’s reign. Both of the men returned for Buckinghamshire, Daniell and Tresham, were part of a larger than usual Household contingent in the Commons, over which Tresham’s father, a trusted royal servant, presided as Speaker. As already noted, it is unlikely that Daniell and Tresham fulfilled the residential qualification demanded of knights of the shire. It is not even clear that Daniell owned land in the county, even though his service as one of its j.p.s suggests that he had acquired an interest there.

As with that of 1447, the election of 1453 suggests that the Crown could exert considerable influence in the county. The Parliament of 1453 also met in favourable circumstances for the Lancastrian Court, and following its summoning Buckinghamshire elected two other Household men, Whittingham and Manfeld. The sheriff responsible for making the return was Robert Olney, who had sat with Manfeld in 1442 and was himself another current or recent member of the royal establishment.